“I just don’t understand,” said Sjoerd that evening after the visitors had gone. Grandpa Brouwer and Uncle Jacob had given the birthday girl a last surprise with a set of tiddlywinks and a Little Black Sambo doll before she went to bed, and Grandma Brouwer, who had already been there during the day, had come back with them for a short moment, to drink a toast to the little monkey. “Absolutely not!” Leaning back from the dining room table balanced on the two back legs of his chair, he looked at Armanda pacing up and down the room with a glass of rosé in her hand. When the child had been missing for more than an hour and a half, she had called him in the office. Pale, his hair standing up every which way, he was in the car turning in to their street when he too saw Nadja jump off the bike, flinch away from her mother, and run. And then leap into the arms of Grandma Nadine, who had squatted down to catch her.
Nadja must have seen herself surrounded by a ring of wet, distraught faces. And from all sides, a slew of questions, which she answered with a smile. It had turned very cold. Everything pointed to a lot more rain or even snow.
IV. Family Novel
23. The Birth
The birth took ruthless precedence. It took precedence first over the darkness; the pains had started, quietly to begin with, in the early hours of the morning, but now they were serious and could no longer be concealed, and dawn was breaking. When the enormously pregnant woman had arrived in the attic, where the strangest atmosphere reigned — a combination of imminent rescue and the awareness that death was just around the corner — she had been helped by many hands to lie down on a mattress laid on a bed frame. They had covered her with a horse blanket. A woman, whose accent defined her as being a stranger to this area, had spread a heavy coat over the bed by way of addition, then laid herself down beside her, shoes and alclass="underline" “Come close, it’ll warm you up!” The woman had obeyed. While the other one dropped off to sleep almost instantly, she — her name was Cathrien Padmos, born Clement — had felt the cold retreat and transform itself into a sensation that she was descending a stone staircase, step by step, into a comfortably warm cave. Then everything started again. Uncontrollable now, in its own rhythm that made no allowances for the weather.
It was coming up on 9 a.m. The attic stank of mud, wet clothes, animal dung, probably rat droppings too, and the bucket behind the door to the staircase. The temperature couldn’t have been much above freezing. The west window, one side of which was nailed shut with boards, admitted a first light of a leaden greenish tinge perfectly in keeping with the general aura of death and destruction. Everyone here, whether asleep or awake, dazed or fully conscious, felt the swaying of the house walls and knew that the undiminished power of the storm was close to tearing off the roof. In the bed, which had been pushed deep under the eaves to protect from drafts, forty-year-old Cathrien Padmos began to breathe heavily for the third time in her married life, or to put it more precisely, the cervix was in its last stages of dilation. To her left, a powerfully built man, Albert Zesgever, who had crawled in with the rest of them, seemed not to notice anything yet.
On the other hand, her bedmate on the right grasped the situation. Lidy raised her head. Where am I, she thought for a moment, then she saw, next to her, a sweat-drenched face that almost instantly took on the dull look that she remembered in herself, whether she had registered it or not at the time, with no choice or will of her own. “How often are they coming?” she asked, as she saw the face soften.
“One behind the other. There’s no pause now,” the other one said, before she threw herself onto her side.
“Oh, then you’re already quite far along!”
Humoring her with false cheer.
This one and that one were now awakening in the attic, and the most unbelievable proof of it was that the air began to smell gloriously of coffee. In a corner, on a sort of improvised dresser made of some cabin trunks with flat lids, the old lady had set up a single-burner camping stove and on it a percolator, a kind of pot with a spout, and a little glass dome that lets you see the coffee bubbling up inside. As she watched her son drive off in the storm the previous night, a tiny mound of humanity perched on enormous tires, Gerarda Hocke had made good use of her fear by carrying every possible thing upstairs. An intelligent old woman, certainly, who remembered one thing above all about a birth, which was that there had to be boiling water. She took the coffee off the flame and poured half of a four-quart milk can of tap water into an enamel pail. Everyday, ordinary actions that tamped down the extremes of the morning. In the daylight this randomly assembled collection of people, who had been as unprepared for the high spring flood as they would have been for war or plague, began to form themselves into a group. Utterly disoriented, they got up off the mattresses or off the floor. For the first time they could now see where they were and who were their companions. The dog, large and brown, his head on his paws and staring straight ahead of him, was giving a not unpleasant imitation of being at peace. Some of them were aware that the goose hadn’t left the heels of the farmer’s wife from the first moment on, others now noticed her, white, with brilliant orange feet, as she stood for a moment then hunkered down again. The first to take up his post by the window again was Cornelius Jaeger. Soon the rest of the grown men were standing there with him. Fundamentally it was the imminent birth that was imposing a certain order on this household.
And obviously it took priority over death and despair. Although Cathrien Padmos must know that her husband and her five-year-old daughter had already drowned, she wasn’t thinking of them. She could feel none of the terrible grief that must be there inside her, only a very particular pain that unlike all others is not the harbinger of death. Only now, as it announced itself again, did she remember it from eight years ago.
She had married early, a boy from the next village, when she was only sixteen. An intimation of this had come to her on July 3, 1930. As she was cycling that evening to Dreischor in the low last light of the glowing red sunset, she had suddenly had the unsettling thought that tonight, at the weekly choir practice of Soli Deo Gloria, she might meet her future husband. And indeed, as became apparent, there was a new voice among the baritones. Age: twenty. Profession: ordinary worker on the farm of Anthonie Hocke, Izak’s father. His name: Johan Padmos. Cathrien Clement was strongly built and dark blond (her hair the same color as the coats of the farm dogs around her) — a girl of the kind who knows what she wants — to get married and then get pregnant as soon as possible. When that didn’t happen, not after the first month of marriage, not after the first year and not after the second, third, or fourth, it became clear to her that she was facing the most important decision of her life. Unhappiness or happiness. The farm girl, who worked as a day laborer, determined to make happiness her calling in the most emphatic way, and was supported in it by her husband, even-tempered by nature, who identified totally with his work and his status on a famous farm where he soon succeeded in becoming one of the six permanent farmworkers. In August, when she rode into the farmyard at vespers on her bike, she saw her husband’s work team laboring under the black cloud of smoke of the colossal five-foot reaping-and-binding machine. They were stacking the sheaves in the German manner, crosswise by fours, and then putting three on top with the ears of the wheat pointing downward. Not a communicative man, her husband, but in the evenings, if the wind was blowing with unexpected force, he would say, “Not the faintest chance,” and she would know what he meant, and would have an image of the same landscape as he did. Black sky, a path with extensive meadows to either side, and farther down, the stubbled fields covered with the sheaves of wheat stacked in this fashion, laughing off the attacks of the strong-to-stormy northwest wind. To their mutual astonishment, after eight years with her husband, who had now risen to become foreman, she found herself pregnant. Seven years after that, pregnant again.